


burning brightly

by malapropism



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Aromantic, Aromantic Character, Character Study, Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures, Developing Relationship, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/M, Family Dynamics, Gen, Hogwarts Era, Hogwarts Letters, Lovegood Family, Magizoology, Ministry of Magic, Parent Death, Parent-Child Relationship, Trans Female Character, magical beasts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-27
Updated: 2016-11-20
Packaged: 2018-04-17 14:02:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 15,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4669313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/malapropism/pseuds/malapropism
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A story of the Lovegood family, and how Luna becomes herself. Or, three times Ollivander made a wand for Luna Lovegood.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> **Content warning:** Canonical death of a parent, who is written in this story as a trans woman. For a more detailed explanation of how she dies, see the note at the end of the chapter.
> 
> This is a short story - really, just fragments in the life of a character that I find really fascinating, who I also feel is often fanonically mischaracterized. It really comes out of a conversation I had with [noiselesspatientspider](http://archiveofourown.org/users/noiselesspatientspider/pseuds/noiselesspatientspider) about how weird it is that Luna is just accepted as this casually quirky character who is often considered only in relation to other, more central characters. This story is essentially my answer to the question, How did Luna become Luna?

“Surprisingly swishy, that one. A curious wand. Fourteen inches and a quarter - quite long, for a young girl, but it’s the wand that chooses the witch, as always. Not for us to say. Vine, which is a mercurial sort of wood, and not one that I particularly prefer, but - I made this in my younger days. I was a different sort of wandmaker, you know. And, ah, yes. A single feather, from a uniquely resplendent phoenix, at the core. I remember its Burning Day well. I cut the vine for the wand on the same day. I had gone deep into a forest in the Western Ghats, and I had strayed from my companion, and there it was - burning, burning…”

Burning, burning. She likes to watch her mother work, tendrils of something akin to flame but impossibly brighter unfurling from her wand. When she was younger, her mother would charm scraps of silk to dance like fire around her head, and she would stretch out to snatch the fabric-flames and laugh as they twisted just out of reach. These were her playthings. 

One day, while her mother’s back was turned, she stretched her hand into the air to snatch a sliver of fire out of the air, a string the color of bluebells. Only it wasn’t charmed cloth at all, but instead some magicked thread of a spell-to-be, and it burned, it burned like ice. A spiderweb scar scrawled across her skin, stained the indigo of ink on porcelain, and she cried out in surprise and fear and the betrayal of a child learning that the world has its thorns for the first time. Her mother rushed over, the ice-flame melting into the air as her wand fell, and she murmured words like a salve, and they flowed over the singed skin, soothing the burn. But she would carry the crystalline scar for the rest of her life, seared into the palm of her hand.

In some homes, it is not always easy to tell the difference between playthings and peril. In Luna Lovegood’s home, there is not always a difference.

 

* * *

 

These sort of things are supposed to happen on dramatic days. Days when the moon is full and the air still and the stars speckle the sky like so many sharp teeth in an endlessly dark mouth, or days when the sun is high and a storm hangs on the horizon line and lightning threatens to set the world on fire. These sort of things are supposed to be cosmic, supposed to be fate, supposed to mean _something_.

But sometimes, these sorts of things just happen.

On a day caught between the chill of winter and the swell of spring, while her father was out buying a scruple of powdered toadstool, he happened to stop at Muggle shop to buy her favorite sweet. Would ten minutes have made a difference? Perhaps, perhaps not. Either way. While he sky did absolutely nothing of any interest and the world turned as it was accustomed to do, there was an accident.

No one ever bothered to tell Luna what happened, because she was there, and it was too horrible to speak of. So she never really understood what magic her mother had been weaving, on the day she died, and she never really understood why there was an explosion without sound. Why all the glass of all the windows in their rook of a house shattered, why those shards sang through the air like so many silent missiles, piercing her mother’s skin, melting, and hardening again. Why her mother died encased in glass. Why her mother never made a sound.

The sound. Luna screamed, and screamed, and screamed, and the sound broke on the rocks that dotted the hill. That is how her father found her: screaming, a howl unbounded by windows or wall, her mother fossilized in crystal-clear glass, a packet of sticky sweets pressed close to his chest. The sugar melted, candy-red and sloppily crystalline, staining the skin above his heart.A sort of saccharine symbolism, sweetly bleeding out. Luna screamed, and screamed, and he ran up the hill, droplets of liquid sugar turning the earth pink in his wake, and she screamed. She screamed.

Eventually, she stopped screaming, and for nearly two years, she stopped speaking altogether.

 

* * *

 

It was a July evening, when Filius Flitwick came to call on the remaining Lovegoods. The sun hung stubborn in the sky, kissing the edge of the world.

“Xenophilius, open this door,” the tiny man squeaked into the keyhole of the house. “I can only imagine that my seventeen letters have gone astray, since I know you wouldn’t ignore your head of house for a full fortnight. So I’ve come to you, and you know better than to keep your aging professor out on the stoop.” 

There was a pause and then the crunch of a rust-iron lock gone long unused, and then the strangely swollen face of Xenophilius Lovegood curled around the grime-blackened door.

As far as faces go, it bore little resemblance to the one Flitwick had taught all those years ago. At Hogwarts, Xenophilius had crackled like lightning trapped in the corridor. (Incidentally, an apt analogy; as a boy, Xenophilius had attempted to create a thunderstorm on the fifth floor, shooting bolts of sparking lightning along the labyrinthine corridors of the Ravenclaw tower and leaving a permanent halo of thunderclouds to encircle the dormitory entrance for months.) Back then, Xenophilius had worn his hair long, a cascade of perfectly straight hair the color of spilt ink. The Charms professor was now greeted by a snarled mess of unevenly shorn, sickly yellowing hair, and the dissonance catapulted Flitwick’s memory back in time, scrabbling for a familiar foothold. How many mornings had he begun waking this boy by the fire, all that bright black hair hanging over a mountain of arcane texts like a wedding veil.

Truth be told, he had never liked Xenophilius. You are not supposed to play favorites, as a Head of House, but they all did, and Xenophilius had not been one of his. Fearsomely inquisitive, Xenophilius hoarded scraps of knowledge, sharpening and shining his facts and figures to a goblin’s gleam. He had the love of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, to be sure, but not in the spirit of Rowena Ravenclaw herself. Knowledge is not something you keep locked away, gathering dust. It is something you share, and Xenophilius Lovegood had been a greedy scholar.

The girl who would grow up to become his wife, the mother of a child with her same brown eyes, had been different, and Flitwick had loved her the best. Pandora, she called herself at Hogwarts, although that wasn’t the name she had always worn. It was a nickname of sorts, but also a warning.

“They always want to know _who_ I am, _what_ I am. They are always asking questions, trying to pry me open. As if I was made for them, for their hands and eyes,” she had said, over tea and biscuits in Flitwick’s office, during her seventh year.

“But in the Muggle myth, Pandora is the one who opens the box, and lets everything terrible out,” Flitwick had said.

Pandora has just smiled. “That’s always the way men tell the story. My Pandora is the one who takes away her secret - takes away the box - from the man who holds it captive, and _she_ opens it, so no one else can. All those horrible things, those ghouls and demons, and even the hope that flies out at the end, they are all her. I have all of that in me, too. And it’s mine.”

Pandora’s parents had fled their home in the Philippines, just as martial law was imposed upon the country. The first piece of mail to arrive at their cramped apartment in London was addressed in the brightest of emeralds to a name unloved by the eleven-year-old girl who had never been the boy the world demanded.

There were people like her, back home. She had an uncle who liked to dress as a girl, but he always said he wasn’t _really_ a woman, and that wasn’t the same. Pandora knew. She had always known.

She told her parents that she had gotten a scholarship to an English boarding school - which was, for the most part, entirely true, save the magic - and wrote a letter back, in a carefully even hand, to the woman called Minerva McGonagall, Deputy Headmistress:

_Thank you for the letter. I would like to come to the school. But you got my name wrong. My name is Pandora Chua and I am a girl, not a boy. I will be on the train._

When Pandora arrived at Hogwarts, she was sorted promptly into Ravenclaw. That night, she fell asleep in her very own four-poster bed, tucked away in the first-year girls’ dormitory.

In her sixth year, Pandora decided that she liked Xenophilius, the seventh-year boy who kept to himself and squirreled away old magical tomes in his well-worn dragonskin bag. Pandora was the brightest in her year, with a mind for invention and spellweaving, and Xenophilius fell madly in love with the girl who was always forgetting her wand behind her ear and could tear through the most advanced spellbooks as if they were child’s play. She pulled something out of Xenophilius - that hard, bitter part, the closed-mouth part - and somehow tempered it. With Pandora, his lips parted when he smiled and his hands stretched a little wider. They were in love.

During her last year at Hogwarts, as life beyond the castle grounds loomed overhead, Pandora turned her ever-working mind to the politics of the wizarding world. Every morning, she wolfed down her breakfast amidst a towering pile of Muggle newspapers and wizarding leaflets; her tirades against the Daily Prophet could be heard across the Great Hall.

“They always miss the bloody _point_!” she would exclaim, jabbing the offending story with her wand tip, setting it briefly alight before she turned to the next page, ash crumbling into her long-forgotten eggs.

She was much more impressed with the Muggle magazines - “You know, Muggle journalists can find the story, meanwhile the people at the Prophet spend more time snogging the Minister of Magic than hitting the pavement, it’s ridiculous!” - and the walls of her study nook in the Ravenclaw tower were papered with Muggle headlines. During her afternoon teas with Flitwick, she would often threaten to leave the wizarding world to “really do some good” as a Muggle journalist, sloshing her tea onto the carpet in an enthusiastic gesture, but she never made good on the promise. She loved magic too much; she couldn’t turn her back on it. She was convinced that the division between the Muggle world and the wizarding world could be surmounted, in the name of a better future.

After Hogwarts, Xenophilius and Pandora started a peculiar little magazine called the Quibbler. When Flitwick opened the very first issue, all those years ago, he had smiled to see Pandora’s hand so brilliantly evident. She had sent him a copy by her own owl, and a scrap of lilac parchment fluttered out from between the magazine’s pages: “Isn’t it wonderful!” she wrote. “You must write for us, soon!”

Flitwick wondered what would have happened if Pandora had turned her back on the wizarding world, and become a rabble-rousing Muggle journalist. He wondered if she would still be alive to send notes dotted with exclamation points on pale purple parchment. He wasn’t sure, though: Pandora had dedicated her life risking danger for the sake of the truth. The truth of a spell, the truth of the story, the truth of her self. These were dark times to be a soldier for the truth.

“How did you come up with the name, though?” Flitwick had asked, dusting off an army of biscuit crumbs from his chintz sofa, during one of their teas. “Wherever did you find it?”

She had laughed. “The library, of course. These British aren’t good for much, but they really know how to build a library.”

 

* * *

 

 

Standing in the narrow, dingy entryway to the rook-shaped house on a hill, with Xenophilius Lovegood bending over him, Flitwick caught himself craning to hear Pandora’s laugh, forgetting for a moment the very circumstances that had brought him to this shadow-filled place.

“Thank you very much,” Flitwick said carefully, taking in Xenophilius’ dislocated gaze, the knotted fingers. “It is good to see you, Xenophilius. It really is.”

“Yes,” Xenophilius said. A long moment stretched between the two men as Flitwick waited for more to follow, but Xenophilius fell silent again.

“Shall I come in, then,” Flitwick stated, gesturing toward the room just off the foyer. A round room, full of glass.

Xenophilius seemed to snap into reality. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “We do not use that room. This way, is fine.”

Flitwick followed his former student down a long hallway and into a darkly cavernous kitchen. They sat in wavering candlelight at a butcher-block table, shadows playing across the ceiling, refracting in the spiderwebs.

“You have come to tell me that I should let them take her,” Xenophilius said in a flat voice.

Flitwick sighed. “I came to tell you that it’s time for Luna to go to school. Just as you did, when you were a boy. It is what’s supposed to happen.”

“It is too dangerous.”

“Hogwarts is quite probably the safest place for her, Xenophilius. The castle is a fortress of magic, which you very well know. And Albus Dumbledore is the greatest wizard of our time, and he would not let any harm befall one of our students.” 

“Not even Dumbledore can protect her from herself, from her own mind and magic.”

A thick silence sank into the air around the two wizards, broken only by the soft scratching of Xenophilius’ nails against the wooden table. He carved strange, angular patterns into the dust. Flitwick wondered how long it had been since the air had moved in this room.

He measured his reply carefully. “She will be more of a danger if she is untrained and untaught. She must learn to use her gifts, to channel them.”

“I can teach her myself,” Xenophilius replied defensively. “I already am.”

“You are a formidable wizard, my boy, but you cannot teach her everything that she needs to know. No single witch or wizard could. The true value of Hogwarts is the _experience_ \- being surrounded by other young minds as they stretch and strain and expand, practicing your wandwork in the dormitory and discussing wizarding history over your breakfast sausages. Encountering ways of thinking entirely unlike your own, and finding strength in your differences. All the possibilities, all the unexpected opportunities to grow…She deserves that, Xenophilius. She deserves the same experience that you had, and she deserves to walk the same halls that Pandora once walked.”

Xenophilius’ mouth tore open into a snarl, as if to strike back at Flitwick’s invocation of Pandora. But before he could reply, a shard of dusty light cracked into the room, cast in relief around the shadow of a paper-thin girl with wide eyes.

“Why hello,” Flitwick said, twirling around in his chair. “You must be Luna.”

The girl nodded, her eyes skittering between her father and the tiny stranger with the golden monocle. A sheet of lank, daisy-yellow hair hung over her shoulders, and Flitwick wondered how long it had taken for the darkness of the Lovegood house to leach the color from her hair.

Flitwick smiled gently. “My name is Filius Flitwick, and I am a professor at Hogwarts. Do you know what Hogwarts is, Luna?”

With her eyes now firmly fixed upon her father, she nodded. Xenophilius remained silent.

“And do you know that you have been asked to come to Hogwarts next month, to go to school?” 

She nodded again and moved closer to the table. Her fingers fluttered.

“Do you want to go to Hogwarts, Luna?”

“ _Stop_ ,” Xenophilius interjected, his voice swelling to fill the room. “She _cannot_ go, she mustn’t go -“

A silver plate crashed through the glass-fronted cupboard, flew through the air, and collided with the stone wall, abruptly punctuating Xenophilius with a clanging thud and a cloud of dust. Flitwick nearly toppled off his stool, and Luna’s face flushed. The cupboard wobbled noisily.

“You see,” Flitwick said quietly to Xenophilius, as the dust settled. The young girl was positively sparking with magic; she crackled like lightning. He turned back to Luna, and repeated his question. 

“Would you like to go to Hogwarts, dear?”

“Yes,” she said hoarsely.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Content warning:** As in canon, Pandora Lovegood dies from a spell gone wrong. The death is described here, but not particularly explicitly.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've added a couple tags to this story - one for a relationship between Luna Lovegood and Rolf Scamander, and one for "aromantic character." Neither of those things come into play in this particular chapter, but both will in the next. I've thought a lot about Luna as a character, and the relationship with Rolf Scamander that JKR has outlined as Luna's canonical future. Like a lot of folks - and especially those of us who really love and treasure Luna as a character! - that relationship always seemed just so unlikely to me. It felt a lot like a product of JKR's tendency to "resolve" plotlines by marrying everyone off. For this story, I contemplated just axing Rolf as a character, and writing Luna the way I always saw her, and giving her the future I had always imagined for her. But while I was writing this chapter, I began to realize that I'd actually really like to see what that relationship could look like. Since this whole story was born out of a desire to "correct" for what I've perceived as really frustrating mischaracterization in the fanonical representation of Luna, I thought that I'd hew as close to canon as I'm able to, and imagine a relationship between Luna and Rolf that felt true to the character I loved. So that's what I'm working on now, and while it doesn't come up at all in this chapter, I wanted to mention it. I'll write a preface to the next chapter that describes the content a little more clearly so that folks who don't want to read about a relationship can opt out of that, of course. But, here's a spoiler for you: it isn't going to be a romantic relationship.
> 
> As always, thanks for reading!

The building bows, as if the walls have been buckling since the shop first opened in 382 B.C. Magic not withstanding, the weight of thousands upon thousands of wands must give in to gravity. A force stronger than spellwork pulls at the oaken shelves, warping the wood, and gravity curves the once-straight lines of Ollivanders, just as it has curved the spine of the wandmaker. 

To some, Garrick Ollivander seems to have simply always existed. But of course, he is mortal, as mortal as any witch or wizard can be. There was once a world without this Ollivander, and there will one day be such a world again. But for now, he walks the warren of the family shop and presides over that most intimate of ceremonies: a young wix’s first wand.

Every year, as the summer sun wanes and the wind begins to change, they come, with their quivering hands and their wet eyes and their bit lips. He has seen some of them before, the children of very old families, family trees built out of yew and elm and oak and vine and woven with unicorn hairs and phoenix feathers and dragon heartstring. But most of the children, he has never seen before; many he will see only the once. All he will know by their measurements, by the wand that came alive in their fingertips. 

_“Seven-and-a-half inches, paradoxically thick, ebony, and Veela hair - an experiment of my youth, this one, not a wand I thought would ever leave these shelves, but once a match has been made, it cannot be undone - “_  

_“Eleven inches, a pleasingly spry red oak, with a truly magnificent phoenix feather - this is a loyal wand, it will serve you well - “_

_“Twelve-and-a-half inches - an unusual length, I must say, but it suits you - blackthorn, dragon heartstring - a strong wand, indeed - “_

_“Nine inches of elm, with a hair from the tail of a unicorn, a sturdy wand, an enduring wand, but I imagine it will sometimes be a bit slow, a bit reluctant at the touch - “_

He does not judge the children, only the wands, and there are some wands worthy of judgment. Cold wands, and dark wands. Wands with stories, wands that sit untouched and untried for centuries before they forcefully fly into the outstretched fingers of a child. Wands that play tricks, wands that are curiously silent.

Ollivander prefers wands that sing.

 

It is the first wand that she reaches for. It happens like this, sometimes, that the young child seems to just _know_ their wand, and she _knows._ As her fingers wrap around the thin sprig of vine, sprays of bluebells plume from the wand tip, weaving themselves into garlands and floating through the air, each landing around the necks of Ollivander, the girl, and the man who brought her into the shop. (Ollivander recalled him, as a boy: nine-and-a-half inches, a swirling hazel, dragon heartstring, rigid.) 

The girl’s eyes widen ever so slightly, but otherwise, she seems unmoved by the wand’s display. Ollivander tugs it gently from her fingertips, rolling it between his own.

“Surprisingly swishy, that one. A curious wand. Fourteen inches and a quarter - quite long, for a young girl, but it’s the wand that chooses the witch, as always. Not for us to say.”

He points the wand forward, carefully holding it level, and a brief jet of golden showers bursts forth and then fades into a shimmering mist.

“Vine, which is a mercurial sort of wood, and not one that I particularly prefer, but - I made this in my younger days. I was a different sort of wandmaker, you know. And, ah, yes…”

The wand glows in his hand, warm to the touch. He remembers, he remembers them all.

“A single feather, from a uniquely resplendent phoenix, at the core. I remember its Burning Day well. I cut the vine for the wand on the same day. I had gone deep into a forest in the Western Ghats, and I had strayed from my companion, and there it was - burning, burning…” 

The man steps forward, in a quick, rough sort of movement, and pulls out a threadbare velvet bag from the pocket of his robes. “What will it cost, then?”

Ollivander peered at the man. _Rigid, unyielding_ , he recalled.

“Seven Galleons,” he replied.

The man paid, and Ollivander carefully nested the wand in a satin-filled box. The girl reached up to the counter and pulled it down herself, and the man pushed his way out of the shop. She followed, holding the green box close to her chest.

She turned around, just before the street claimed them both, and smiled. Her eyes were wide and blank and strangely opaque, as if they had absorbed all the light in the room.

The shop door rattled on its hinges, shutting out the rest of the world with a _whoosh_ , and as Ollivander sank back into the shadows, the wands hummed softly.

* * *

Luna sees them. Glowing white eyes and bodies of bone, encased in slick, taut skin that looks more like leather than anything living. They are shadows with skeletons and great translucent wings that stretch out over the heads of children who do not look up. She can see the sun through the sinew. They seem to bristle at their harnesses, ever so slightly rattling the black carriages. The cheerful, boisterous students who clamber up the carriages’ little ladders do not seem to notice.

She steps forward, and reaches out to touch the nearest winged creature’s bowed head. Its breath is hot and wet on her hand, and so very real. Behind her, a small group of first year students notice her slow caress of the air, unable to see the invisible beast beneath her hand, and they snicker softly.

“Firs’ years, yer with me,” a large man waves with a cheery grin, his outstretched hand nearly swatting a nearby student into the ground. “This-a way!”

Luna casts one last glance at the beasts who pull the carriages and follows the tide of first years towards the man with a bushy black beard. “Four of yeh to a boat, all right then? No shoving, there’ll be enough for the whole lot.”

Luna is one of the last to slip into a boat, perching alongside a boy with mousy brown hair and wide, eager eyes that blinked furiously as he chattered excitedly about the train ride. A girl with a constellation of freckles nodded politely every few words, absently tugging at her wiry red curls and glancing up towards the looming castle. Seated next to her, a boy with long, thin ropes of black hair dipped a finger into the Black Lake, the water lapping over his ochre skin. He looked bored.

“I was just so surprised to get my letter! My father’s a milkman, and I don’t think my little brother had ever even _seen_ an owl, much less had one land in his breakfast cereal, and I really couldn’t believe it - my mum didn’t say anything for _hours_ , but you know, once the shock wore off, everyone was really happy for me, and my brother Dennis wants to come, too - I hope he gets a letter, that would be really great. Do any of you have brothers or sisters at Hogwarts? Do you?”

The red-haired girl nodded her way through the boy’s question, and then started a little at the sudden, unexpected pause. “Oh, yeah,” she said, after a moment, with a slight eye roll that only Luna seemed to catch. “Loads, actually. All brothers. Two already finished school, and the other four are here now.”

“Blimey, that’s amazing! So you’re from a real wizarding family, that’s so cool, no one in my family had ever heard of Hogwarts and we all thought this magic stuff was just for storybooks, you know, but what about you, then?”

Again, the silence fell unexpectedly, and the other boy looked up to meet the cheerful grin. He held it for a moment, glancing blankly at the cheerful grin on the other end of the question.

“My sister,” he replied, turning back to watch the boat’s progress across the lake. Luna could not quite place his accent.

When it became clear that he would offer no further details, the eager boy finally turned to Luna and smiled. “Have you got any family at Hogwarts?”

Luna thought about how her mother had once floated across this same lake, had stared up at the castle just like Luna did. She thought about how she would soon walk the same corridors and cobblestones that her mother had trod.

“Sometimes, it feels as if I do,” she replied slowly, contemplatively, truthfully.

The other three first years looked at her quizzically. Even the long-haired boy was startled into sharing a conspiratorial glance with the freckled girl. Luna didn’t notice; she was watching the castle rise taller and taller, as the boats neared the dock, trying to see through her mother’s eyes.

 

They don’t like her very much, and she knows it. She hears what they whisper behind cupped hands and she notices how their laughter trails her like a shadow. She sees the way their fingers point at her clothes when they think she isn’t looking. 

_Loony, loony Lovegood,_ they sing under their breath. Sometimes, she sings along.

She knows that they find her strange, she knows that they avoid her whenever they can, but she doesn’t know _why_. She doesn’t know _when_ or _how_ it all started.

If you were ever young, you know that there really isn’t an answer to that sort of question. There just isn’t a reason, to tell the truth. One day, someone does something a little strange, a little out of the ordinary: trips on their way to the potions cupboard, or finds themselves at the wrong end of a backfiring charm, or even just parts their hair in a way that makes someone at your table snicker. And then suddenly, you’re all snickering, so glad to not be _laughed at_ , so grateful to be laughing. So you keep laughing, until one day, you forget how to stop. You forget that you are laughing at a person, because it feels like you’re just laughing at an idea, at a fiction, at a story you tell. And in some ways, that’s true. Loony Lovegood doesn’t exist, after all. You made her up, and you were just so glad that she wasn’t _you_ , that you kept laughing.

 

For years, Luna rode in the carriages alongside people who could not see what propelled them forward, with people who did not think to ask, with people who laughed and whispered when she greeted the thin air.

One day, at the very beginning of her fourth year at Hogwarts, someone else saw the skeletal, winged creatures that she now knew to be thestrals. 

"Oh, yes," she said, in an attempt to soothe the fear splayed across Harry Potter’s face. "I've been able to see them ever since my first day here. They've always pulled the carriages. Don't worry. You're just as sane as I am.”

He did not, she thought, look particular comforted by that fact. But by now, Luna was used to this sort of reaction when she explained - in perfectly logical, commonsensical terms, she rather thought - the truth behind the fictions that other people seemed so willing to accept as fact.

She would be lying if she said it did not bother her. She was, after all, a teenager like the rest of them, with anxieties and worries and questions of her own. At one point, she had wanted to be liked, in that normal sort of way.

On her very first day at Hogwarts, she had been given a choice, and she had long thought that she had probably made the wrong one. The Sorting Hat had asked her where she would like to go, had given her the chance to choose her family for the next seven years, and in that moment, she answered without hesitation: “Where my mother went.”

“ _RAVENCLAW_ ,” the Hat said to the Hall, but its final words were just for her, a mere whisper as she pulled the cap from her head. “Although, my choice for her would not have been my choice for you…”

Some days, as she traced her fingers along the shifting stone walls and listened to the echo of past centuries, she felt like a ghost. Some days, Professor Flitwick looked at her like she was one, as if he could see right through her and back into the past. And Luna seemed to be more sensitive to the magic of the castle than most; she heard the portraits’ chatter when no one else could and she felt the throb of ancient spellwork in her veins. When she tried to describe these sensations to her classmates, they laughed.

“That isn’t possible,” they said. “That isn’t _real_.”

That always seemed like a strangely shortsighted way of looking at the world, coming from a group of witches and wizards who spent their days transfiguring toads into tea kettles and practicing arithmancy. Luna never quite figured out where the line between _magical_ and _make-believe_ lay, and eventually, she simply gave up.

She decorated her ears with radishes and slipped copies of the Quibbler into textbooks abandoned in the Ravenclaw common room. She befriended Madam Pince, a feat even for the most studious of Ravenclaws, and spent most of her spare time reading centuries-old travelogues penned in faded ink by witches and wizards who had traversed the edges of the world in search of the improbably possible. On the days when Hogwarts felt too familiar, too cloistered, too claustrophobic, she daydreamed about foreign lands and curious creatures and a life unwatched, unobserved, unremarked upon. She pretended like she did not notice how people stared when she walked by, but she knew.

Hagrid, the man who had shepherded the first years across the Lake on their first day at Hogwarts, was the person who told her about the thestrals. He had overheard her attempting to describe the creatures to a group of Ravenclaw first years in the Great Hall, and as their laughter trickled away and Luna was left standing alone in the center of the Hall, he gently patted her on the shoulder.

“Yer right, lass,” he said. “About the carriages, and the things that pull ‘em. They’re called thestrals, and I can see ‘em, plenty of folk can. Just not usually so young.”

She looked up unblinkingly, her mind turning rapidly, trying to determine which question to ask first.

“Why would the school use them to draw the carriages? Why not just a spell, or something that everyone could see?”

Hagrid tugged on his beard and cocked his head thoughtfully. “Y’know, I’m not quite sure. They were a bit of a project for one of the Headmasters, a while back. A pretty awful wizard, by all accounts, but he took an interest in the thestrals and rounded up a herd, and well, something hadta be done with them. They don’t mind me so much, so I’ve gotten them trained up a bit. But they’ve pulled the carriages for as long as I can remember, just used to be a bit of a more exciting ride, I’d guess.”

“Are they your pets, then?”

Hagrid chuckled slightly. “Nah, they wouldn’t make very good ones. Don’t really trust most people, and if a thestral doesn’t trust you, there’s not much that can come from sticking around. Bit like hippogriffs that way, actually. But these ones hang about in the Forest, and they listen to me alright, and I reckon we’ve got the only trained herd in the country.”

“And you’ve always been able to see them?”

Hagrid nodded.

“Why can we see them, but the others can’t?”

Hagrid shifted his feet, and looked up at the ceiling of the Great Hall before answering. “Most folks don’t care for thestrals very much. Find ‘em unsettling, whether they can see them or not. You can only see a thestral if you’ve seen death - _really_ seen it, and felt it. So that, plus their looks, makes people think they’re some kind of bad omen. Some people even think they bring death with ‘em, but that’s rubbish - they can’t help looking the way they do.”

Luna looked up at Hagrid, and said nothing.

Later on, Luna looked up _thestrals_ in a heavy, clothbound volume at the library, and it was all there, everything that Hagrid had said. As she turned the pages, her ears rang, and it sounded like lightning.

* * *

The tide begins to turn, and as the world beyond the Hogwarts gates grows darker, Luna finds a kind of lightness she has never known: _friends_. The ginger-haired girl who had sat in the boat with Luna all those moons ago, the girl with all the ginger-haired brothers, becomes Ginny Weasley, and she is a friend. And one weekend during their fourth year at Hogwarts, Ginny brought Luna to a grimy sort of pub in the shadows of Hogsmeade, and Luna met the others.  

She had seen them before, of course, and naturally, everyone talked about them, that golden trio from Gryffindor. Always running around Hogwarts together, losing points for their house with late-night misdeeds but somehow earning it all back at the eleventh-hour. At the forefront of every controversy, every scandal, every surprise. And it wasn’t just Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, who merited conversation. Most of the younger students were envious of the trio - of their freedom, their school-wide fame - and quite a few of the older students were, too. Sometimes, that jealousy curdled, and it was not at all uncommon to hear a Ravenclaw mutter “Wish _I_ could pull a Gryffindor,” when a late-night assignment proved particularly unwieldy. They all knew what was meant by “Gryffindor”: that miraculous ability to somehow pull it off, to excel, without really even trying. But for the most part, there was a quiet cult of celebrity around the three Gryffindors, and their antics were met with the sort of bemused detachment you reserve for people who seem to somehow exist on an entirely different plane from your own.

The Triwizard Tournament had changed everything, though. The students seemed to drop all pretense that Harry Potter was just another teenaged boy, and they studied him with in that careful, clinical manner usually reserved for the notorious and the infamous. They whispered about how he must have bamboozled the Goblet, about how Dumbledore probably rigged it for him, about how all the attention must have gone to Harry’s head. And then, after the final task of the Tournament, after Harry emerged from the maze with Cedric Diggory’s broken body, no one even bothered to whisper. Instead, they shouted in capital letters splashed across the front page of the Daily Prophet and let their voices carry down the length of the Great Hall. Their words were tinged with shadow and laden with suspicion. 

_“Can you believe that he’s trying to convince everyone that he saw You Know Who come back to life? It’s like he’s trying to make Cedric’s death all about him, how pathetic is that…”_

_“Well, I heard that he did Diggory in himself, that he couldn’t stand losing and lost it and now Dumbledore’s covering up for his pet. The He Who Must Not Be Named story is just a cover-up.”_

_“I reckon that it’s more than that, and Dumbledore told Potter to make up that stuff about You Know Who coming back for his own purposes, my parents’ve always said that Dumbledore’ll do anything to get more power.”_

_“Dumbledore and Potter - they’re both mad, if you ask me.”_

_“What about Granger and Weasley? What do you make of them sticking by Potter’s story? I mean, Weasley doesn’t seem like he’s got the spine to stand up to the ‘Great Harry Potter,’ but Granger’ll mouth off at just about anyone. I wonder what spell he’s got her under…”_

Like the rest of the world, many at Hogwarts were certain that Harry was little more than a teenaged madman, and that anyone who willingly consorted with him might just be a little mad themselves. While the Daily Prophet cast Harry Potter as the unstable enemy of the wizarding world, Luna’s father defended the Boy Who Lived in the Quibbler. Luna took to leaving copies of the magazine around the castle, slipping each new edition onto the house tables at breakfast and scattering copies around the library. But in that long summer after the Triwizard Tournament, the Daily Prophet had captured the imagination of witches and wizards across Great Britain, and Luna could only watch from afar as the glow of the golden trio dimmed and Harry Potter became more and more embittered and embattled.

Until one day, she found herself sitting with the Boy Who Lived, talking about the coming war, and how they were going to fight back.

 

Luna had never fit in anywhere, and in most respects, the DA was no exception. But for the first time in her life, she was fully accepted, oddities and all, and amongst the Gryffindors at the heart of the group, she found _friends._  

She knew that Harry, and Ron, and Hermione didn’t think of her as a “friend” in the same way, but she also knew that they valued her in a way that others had not. They saw that she had something to offer. Ginny had been her first friend at Hogwarts, the first person willing to make an effort to talk to her instead of laugh at her. And in Neville Longbottom, with his stuttering speech and fumbling fingers, she found someone who knew what it was like to feel trapped in the murky waters of other people’s perceptions.

Sometimes, she forgot how deadly serious their work in the DA really was, because it was often simply _fun_ , and Luna Lovegood had never really had fun before. 

Months later, as the flashing lights of dueling wands ricocheted against the walls of the Department of Mysteries, as her Stunned body collapsed to the stone floor, the reality of it all would become apparent, and the war would begin, once again. But for those precious few months, tucked away in a secret room full of soft pillows and glittering dark detectors, Luna was happy.

* * *

“I don’t want to die here.”

“I think it would be strange if you did. But really, we shouldn’t bother worrying. Someone will come for us, and we’ll be ready.” 

“And how will they know we’re here? You don’t understand. No one is coming. There simply isn’t a way.”

“Well, maybe that’s true. Maybe it’s not. But I’m going to believe, because well, there isn’t much else to do when you’re locked up in a dungeon.” 

 

When the darkness threatens to consume them, when the future narrows, when all seems lost, Luna asks the old wandmaker to tell her about his craft. She asks about the properties of wand woods, and the strengths of different cores. She asks him why he prefers yew to rowan, why he forewent Veela hair in his wands, why the shorter wands tend to choose people who are somehow lacking. She asks him about the patterns he carves into the wood, and about his favorite designs.

And so he tells her stories. Stories about wands he loved and wands he wished he had never made. He tells her about the mishaps that can occur when a wand is improperly mended, and about the injuries a wand can never recover from. He describes the wands sometimes as fingerprints, sometimes as fortunetellers. She listens to it all. The edges of the shadows seem to peel back ever so slightly when the old wandmaker talks. His stories are cracks of light in the darkness.

Luna had lost her wand to the Death Eaters. And sometimes, Ollivander tells her a story of the wand he would make for her, if they ever escaped. Luna reminds him, _when,_ not if.

“I remember your first, of course. How could I forget. An unusually long wand, made of vine, with a phoenix feather at its core. A most interesting wand, indeed. Did it serve you well?”

“Immensely,” she replied, twirling her fingers in the air, as if the wand had never left them.

“I imagine that a longer wand does suit you quite nicely, but I wouldn’t use vine for your next. Vine is suitable enough for a young witch, but I rather think you will need something stronger in the coming days. Not quite as unyielding as walnut, but perhaps a nice mahogany. With another phoenix feather, naturally. Thick enough so that I could do a fitting carving along its length, something like this, you see…” Ollivander’s voice trailed off, as he scratched a weblike pattern into the grimy floor. Luna clenched her fist instinctively, the blue scars on her palm tingling.

 

When Ollivander presented Luna with her second wand, which she would carry with her until the very end, he made a small bow. “For you, my dear. You, who are so very like the phoenix feather core at the heart of a wand - a center of light in the shadows, a source of strength when I was weakened by fear.”

Luna smiled, and took the wand from her friend’s outstretched hands.

* * *

The story of the war must be told: of those who fought and lived, of those who fought and died, and all who fought and lost. The war is a part of Luna’s story, but it’s a story for another time. 

After the war, the work of surviving began. And while some ran to to the four corners of the globe, desperate to outrun the burden of living, many survivors took comfort in each other. In the coming years, the newly reconstituted Quibbler would run an award-winning photoessay on the “families of the war,” documenting the young couples born on the battlefield and the lives they built for themselves. (With Luna’s blessing, Lee Jordan - who, in addition to helping George run Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes, had turned his wartime show Potterwatch into the foundation of a public media empire, offering critical coverage on the wizarding world - had revived The Quibbler. Over the years, it had evolved into a hard-hitting, critical bastion of wizarding print journalism, offering a much-needed counterpoint to the Daily Prophet. Luna’s erratic column on Magizoology found a curious but welcome home amongst opinion pieces championing  Wizengamot reform and exposes from the inside of the Department of Magical Transportation.)

Luna did not return to Hogwarts after the battle. When Professor Flitwick asked her why she wouldn’t finish her education, she replied, “I rather think I’ve learned all I can from Hogwarts, but there’s a whole world to explore, at the very least.” She then launched into a spirited, albeit entirely one-sided, debate on the likelihood of extraterrestrial magical creatures.

And so in some ways, Luna was one of the survivors who ran. But she did not run away _from_ the past - instead, she ran towards the future that she had always imagined for herself, long before the war. Her travels took her across the world and then back again, to lands that she had never imagined in pursuit of creatures that only she had imagined. And she actually found some of those creatures, although the Crumple-Horned Snorkack remained a mystery. Her successes were printed up in the Quibbler, and after she published a particularly fascinating column on the eating habits of the Mackled Macalaw, a letter arrived at her tiny cabin along the Croatian shoreline.

_Dear Luna Lovegood,_  

_I enjoyed your recent missive from the wilds most immensely, and I have to admit, I keep my Quibbler subscription up for the sole purpose of reading about your adventures. My only complaint is that your updates are as infrequent as as a Graphorn sighting. I do wish that you would write more often, most particularly for the benefit of my fellow desk-bound naturalists. It’s quite gratifying to hear of tales (and tails) from the field._  

_I missed you at Hogwarts by a few years - I was a classmate of the second Weasley brother, Charlie. (Have you ever met him? He’s doing some truly fascinating work over in Romania, with a displaced herd of Hungarian Horntails.) I rather wish I hadn’t - missed you, that is._  

_If you ever feel the urge to jot down some of your adventures for a rather limited audience, I’d love to hear more. And if you find yourself back in London, perhaps we could discuss your work over dinner. I’d like that._

_An ardent fan,_

_Rolf Scamander_

Luna set aside the letter, and while she had fully intended to return to it, an impromptu trip to Cambodia forestalled her response. Two months later, as she unpacked her bags at the little flat she kept in London, she plucked the forgotten letter from the inside of her travel tea kettle and smiled. She scribbled a reply and tied it to the leg of Aeolus, an unusually slim bird with silver feathers and wide yellow eyes.

_Frightfully nice of you to write. I’ll be at Burnham Beeches tomorrow at quarter to nine, tracking a domesticated herd of Clabberts that I believe a certain wizarding family released into the woods, once they’d gotten too big to keep as Muggle-warding devices. Despicable. You could come._

_Luna_

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the last chapter of this story, we'll see how Luna's relationship with Rolf develops, and the story of the third time Ollivander made a wand (or, in this case, wands) for Luna. Hopefully, that'll be up soon!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A note on content: This chapter contains brief discussions of sex, sexuality, and relationships. This remains entirely in the abstract, recounted in conversations between Luna and other characters, and are not explicit.
> 
> The second half of this chapter focuses on how Luna navigates the concept of love and articulates what she wants out of relationships, as someone who doesn't experience romantic love. This isn't meant to be a primer on what it means to be aromantic, and this character's experiences aren't intended to be definitive, exhaustive, or universally representative. It's what I imagine this particular character would experience, and how she would talk about it, and what she might want out of a relationship with another person - particularly within the confines of what JKR has outlined as "canon" for these characters. As I wrote in an earlier note, I was interested in trying to reconcile my own idea of Luna as a character with that future that JKR imagined, and this story is the product of that work. If I were writing a completely AU story, I imagine that I'd pick a different path for Luna, in some regards.
> 
> If something feels off or wrong to any readers who identify along the aromantic spectrum, _please_ feel free to use the comments space to bring any issues to my attention.
> 
> And, a note on the future of this story: this chapter ended up being much longer than I had originally planned, and I also ended up writing a fair chunk of it from Rolf Scamander's perspective. I didn't quite get to everything I'd wanted to, but as this seemed like a natural break, I'm going to add a coda to this story. That final chapter will recount the final time Ollivander makes Luna a wand (or two), weaving in the story of how Luna and Rolf decide to bring children into their lives, and Luna's memories of her father; it'll be up fairly soon, I imagine.

She was not what he expected, but to be honest, that wasn’t so surprising.

Rolf spends his days in a tiny, cramped cubicle at the offices of the Pest Advisory Board, a low-level employee in a low-priority subdivision of the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures. For the most part, he pushes paperwork, although he is ostensibly a Community Liaison on the Subject of Pests, Potential and Probable. Reports of possible pest infestations and sightings land onto his desk, and Rolf reviews the scribbled drawings, hastily-taken snapshots, and near-illegibly quilled firsthand accounts, assigning each a degree of both veracity and volatility. He replies to angry Howlers and plaintive owls, offering tips to community members on how to best explain a Bundimun infestation to their Muggle neighbors and explaining that no, the sudden preponderance of dust bunnies under your bed isn’t indicative of a pest problem, and could likely be solved with a more vigorous application of Dust-Begone potion. He is good at his job, and has the highest clearance rate of all the Community Liaisons; he’s got a knack for correctly identifying magical creatures of all sorts, and a calming voice that soothes even the most frazzled wizard.

Most of his coworkers, however, come to attribute his success to his famous last name, and Rolf isn’t particularly well-liked at the office. 

Rolf’s grandfather, Newt Scamander, is the most famous Magizoologist in recent history, and his book _Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them_ is a popular bestseller amongst the wizarding community. He was awarded the Order of Merlin, Second Class for his work; he is both a household name and world-renowned authority on magical creatures, from the tiny to the gargantuan. Like hundreds of Hogwarts students over the years, Rolf studied from his grandfather’s book in Care of Magical Creatures.  

During his first few weeks at the Pest Advisory Board, his name had merited the frequent double-take, and his new colleagues peppered him with questions about life with the great Newt Scamander, about all the extraordinary places he had traveled and all the mysterious beasts he had encountered. Rolf spun the same stories that he always told, anecdotes about running from fiery dragons in Bulgaria and the six months spent tracking demiguises in the Far East and so on.

He always left out the inescapable side effect of having a famous grandfather like Newt Scamander, though. When you spend the majority of your life traveling around the world and your spare time writing long articles on your adventures, regaling your readership with your exploits and meticulously chronicling your findings, there isn't much time left to spend at home with your grandson. Or your son, for that matter. 

Rolf’s father, Albrecht Scamander, worked as a caretaker for the Magiko Zoologiko Institute, an academic center for the study of magical creatures that had been founded by his father, located in a seemingly derelict warehouse in London and host to a horde of strange and wondrous creatures. But Newt Scamander rarely visited the institute, and Albrecht rarely mentioned his father.

As Rolf ran out of stories about his famous grandfather, his coworkers began to create their own: _He only got this job because of his grandda. He’s the chief’s pet, just because of his last name. He gets all the easy cases. He thinks he’s too good for us, probably only took this job to seem humble, he’ll be gone in a year and probably end up the boss of us._ A few of the other Community Liaisons stuck by Rolf, but for the most part, he learned to keep to himself. It was just easier that way. He had plenty of friends from Hogwarts, who had long ago learned to introduce him only by his first name, and to offer a trade whenever Rolf got his grandfather’s Chocolate Frog card. He didn’t need to befriend his officemates; it was just a job.

One day, as he took his solitary lunch at the flimsy desk in his miniature cubicle, he found an unlikely escape from the mundane reality of the Pest Advisory Board in the pages of the Quibbler. Specifically, in the infrequently published column of Luna Lovegood, the traveling wizarding naturalist and adventurer. Her accounts of living amongst the Re’em in the northernmost Canadian tundra, her documentation of the local Ramora preservation efforts in the Indian Ocean, her interview with the oldest Sphinx living in the wild - it was as if Rolf was traveling alongside her, as if he was far, far away from the tedium of his day-to-day existence. He tacked up his favorite columns on the walls of his cubicle, and the more he read, the more curious he became about their author.

Her name was, of course, already familiar to him; it had been prominently featured in the reports of the Battle of Hogwarts, and in stories of the early resistance efforts against Voldemort, long before the rest of the wizarding world was willing to admit that He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named had returned. She was somewhat of a mystery, though; other than her columns for the Quibbler and the occasional society page snapshot captured at a friend’s wedding, she was rarely mentioned in the tomes about the war and its survivors.

Burning with curiosity, Rolf had pulled Hermione Granger aside after their fortnightly departmental meeting to ask her if she had known Luna at school. Hermione, who had been appointed Head of the Office for House-Elf Relocation, and was in the midst of an office-wide overhaul of procedure and policy, immediately launched into a diatribe about Newt Scamander’s “absolutely disgusting, despicable work at the Office, and yes, I know that he’s your grandfather, but surely you can agree that it’s his legacy of oppressive policymaking that we’ve all been left to deal with, and the impact is really quite widespread - I could show you some charts, and we’ve also been transcribing interviews with formerly enslaved house elves, you would not _believe_ the conditions they’ve been subjected to, and I just -“

“Yes, yes,” Rolf said hurriedly. “Of course, any time - but I was actually wondering about a classmate of yours, at Hogwarts -“

Hermione visibly bristled, but Rolf pressed on. “She writes a column on magical creatures for the Quibbler - Luna Lovegood? Did you know her?”

“Oh,” Hermione said relievedly. “I thought - well, I assumed, because everyone always does, that you were asking about - never mind. Luna, of course I knew her. _Know_ her, I mean - she just wrote me from Turkmenistan. Do you need to talk to her about something for the office?”  

“Ah, yes,” Rolf agreed. “We’re working on a…project, a project - it’s a comparative analysis of nargle sightings in different European countries, and well, she’s written about them, so we thought -“ 

“Sure,” Hermione said. “Sounds sensible. Would you like an address for her? She can be quite difficult to contact - always moving around, but I believe she’ll be at this little outpost on the Croatian coast, south of Dubrovnik, for the next few weeks - you could probably reach her there. She doesn’t Floo very much, so a letter is really the best way to find her.” 

“That would be great, thank you,” Rolf replied. He couldn’t quite believe he’d managed it. 

“Of course,” Hermione said. “Now, we’ll have to find a time to sit down and discuss how your grandfather set house elf rights back fifty years, I’ll get a memo to you later this week.”

 

Rolf pinned the scrap of paper with Luna’s address to the cork board in his cubicle, alongside the cut-outs of her column, and for a week, he found himself absently staring at it during quiet moments at the office. But he wasn’t entirely sure what to write, and so he put it off.

But as the end of another week loomed, Rolf knew that he didn’t have much time, and he couldn’t fathom trying to get another address from Hermione, not when he’d been dodging her interdepartmental memos for the past eight days. And so he sat down at his desk, picked up his favorite quill, and began to write.

_Dear Luna Lovegood,_

_I enjoyed your recent missive from the wilds most immensely, and I have to admit, I keep my Quibbler subscription up for the sole purpose of reading about your adventures…_

Before he could second guess himself, he had whistled for an outgoing owl, tied the letter to its leg, and watched the bird whoosh off into the Ministry-wide network of owl ducts. As the bird’s feathers fluttered out of sight, Rolf’s stomach immediately twisted with regret. _I sounded ridiculous, like I’m at least seventy, and she’ll think that I’m strange, in a bad way, and she won’t write back…_

And for months, it seemed like that had been the case: she didn’t write back. Until one evening, a peculiar bird with markings like he’d never seen glided into his open apartment window.

_Frightfully nice of you to write,_ her reply began. But the final three words were all that Rolf would really remember from her short letter.

_You could come_.

 

And so he did. At quarter to nine, he met Luna at Burnham Beeches, and they spent the morning hunting Clabberts. She wore orange and pink striped robes - “Clabberts find competing colors to be rather sedating, actually” - and kept her wand tucked in her long, braided hair. There were tiny silver bells woven into the pale plaits, and when she leapt forward in pursuit of a spotted Clabbert, the bells sang. 

She was maddeningly confusing at times. She had a tendency to interrupt him with sentences that seemed to come straight from conversations she was conducting in her own mind, and sometimes, he struggled to keep up. But she was deliriously funny, and everything she said was _interesting_ , in its own way. And for some reason, she didn’t seem to mind spending three hours trekking across the park, looking for Clabberts, with a total stranger. She never once mentioned his grandfather.

By noon, they were sweaty and hungry, and when he asked if she’d like to have lunch at this Thai restaurant in a Muggle neighborhood he loved, she said yes. He found that he was still somehow nervous to sit down with her, even though they’d spent the morning tangled up in the brush, listening for the distinctive Clabbert call. She seemed completely, inexplicably unperturbed.

He asked her questions about Hogwarts - about what had changed since he’d left, about Hagrid’s Care of Magical Creatures classes, about what it had been like to be in Ravenclaw. He didn’t ask about the war, about Dumbledore’s Army, about Harry Potter and the other resistance fighters, and she didn’t bring it up.

She told him about her recent travels, and about her thoughts on the state of wizarding naturalism, and why she didn’t think very highly of the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures: “You know, it’s right there in the name - _regulation_ , _control_ \- it’s no wonder that so many magical creatures hide from us - for example, the Dundering Stiltwalkers, they’re surprisingly really bright…” They talked until the restaurant manager shooed them out onto the street, the other patrons long gone, the sun slipping behind the city skyline.

She walked him to his tube stop - he had offered to do the same for her, and she had just laughed - and as he descended into the station, she waved cheerily from aboveground. 

“Watch out for wrackspurts,” she called down the stairs. “They prefer the darkness, so they are always lots of them in the stations. I never ride the tube without my helmet.”

  

She traveled for weeks at a time, and during her absences, Rolf would receive letters that ended mid-sentence and packages of wildflowers and poorly developed photographs of vague, ambiguous subjects with captions like “SITHENE SPRITE SPOTTED” and “GETTING CLOSE TO ACQUIRING DIRICRAWL DUNG.” When she returned to London, they spent hours combing the parks for rogue Nogtails and scouring the archives at the Magiko Zoologiko Institute for historical traces of the creatures of lore that so captivated Luna’s imagination. Rolf took Luna on adventures of his own, through the winding alleys of Muggle London, into tea shops and open-air markets and all the strange hobby holes of the city. They picnicked at the ruins of St. Dunstan-in-the-East and went for long, rain-soaked walks in Abney Park. Rolf made a game out of selecting increasingly hard-to-find, obscure restaurants and museums for their afternoons out. And when Luna laughed in delight, eyes widening in surprise, he felt a joyous sort of warmth bubble up. 

As the months passed, he began to realize that when Luna was off traveling, his days were just a little bit duller, a little bit less interesting. And the more he thought about a future without her, the more he realized that he had fallen in love with a woman who moved so quickly that even her shadow couldn’t keep up. She was always racing forward, burning brightly into the dark unknown. He was always trying to catch up, and she would always be just out of reach.

And as he swallowed that initial burst of fearful panic, he realized that he wouldn’t want her to stay still. He had fallen in love with a woman who was always dancing, always dreaming, and that was the most extraordinary thing.  

Rolf was not an adventurer, and he never would be. As dull as his desk job at the Pest Advisory Board might be, he had never harbored a desire to chase the skyline, to feel the rush of discovery. Whenever he had imagined his future, it was in London, the city that had been his first great love. He wanted to explore its every corner, know its every alleyway; he wanted to map the intersection of the wizarding world and Muggle life, and to study the magical creatures that called the city’s darkest corners home. He wanted a settled life _._

But he also wanted a life with Luna, and he thought that, in her own way, she might want a life with him. He just wasn’t sure what that could possibly look like.

 

He stood before the bathroom mirror, nervously fidgeting with the him of his t-shirt. “Luna, I have something to tell you,” he recited portentously to the washbasin. “No, that sounds like I’ve got spattergroit or something, this isn’t supposed to sound like I’ve contracted a lifelong illness…” 

He straightened his spine and started again. “Hey, Luna, I’ve really loved getting to know you these last few months, and I was wondering if you’d like to - if you’d be interested in…if…oh, hell,” he groaned. This wasn’t working.

“I really enjoy spending time with you, and I was hoping we could keep doing that, except maybe not just as friends - although we’ve never even talked about that, of course, but I consider you a friend and I hope that -“ 

“Just come out with it, man!” his mirror moaned.

  

After an hour of false starts in front of an increasingly vexed mirror, Rolf realized that there really was just one way to do this. He splashed his face with cool water, threw a towel over the mirror, and headed to his desk. He pulled out a sheet of thick, periwinkle blue paper, and his favorite quill - the very one that he had used to write that first letter to Luna, addressed to a tiny hut on the Croatian seashore.

_Do you remember the first letter I wrote you? I was so nervous about it, and it was more of a fan letter than anything else, but you wrote back. And then we met in person, and it was wonderful, and you kept writing me, and we kept seeing each other, and somehow, you became the most important person in my life. Whenever you’re away, I miss you in this really visceral way, like my bones hurt and.And when you come back, it’s like the world is brighter, and everything is better. I want that feeling forever, you know?_

_It’s so silly to write this all down, but I don’t know how else to say it. After all these months, I’m still just a bloke writing you a letter that doesn’t make much sense. But I’m going to get to the point, I promise._

_Here it is. I really, really like you, Luna. I love you, actually. I think I might be in love you, to tell you the truth. And I’d like to give it a go - give us a go, I mean. And I know that you’ll still travel the world, and I don’t think that a relationship between us would look like any relationship I’ve ever seen before, but I don’t care - I think it could be amazing, wonderful. And I want to try, if you do - if you feel the same._

_So…once you’ve finished reading this, look up at me. And let’s talk._  

_Rolf_

 

* * *

 

She finished reading the letter and blinked. 

They had been drinking honey wine and eating pepper sandwiches at a tiny park near his flat when he had suddenly pressed the envelope into her hand. He stood up jerkily, tripping over his words: “I’ll go for a quick walk, give you some space, back in a minute - well, more than a minute, because you need time to read it, of course. Okay, yes. Be back.”

She had nodded with a smile, curious and even eager to read it. Now that she’d finished the letter, there was a not-so-small part of her that wished she hadn’t.

It wasn’t the first time that someone had said those words to her. Years ago, when they were still at Hogwarts, after Ron, Harry, and Hermione had left the school, Neville had mumbled almost that very sentence - _I think I might be in love with you_ \- while they were setting up for a DA meeting. She had laughed, which had brought tears of frustration to his eyes. “It isn’t funny to me,” he had muttered. She had immediately apologized, and tried to explain that her laughter wasn’t meant to be mocking, or cruel; she had laughed out of a mix of curious delight and ludicrous disbelief. That kind of love wasn’t something she thought of, _ever_ , she had tried to explain. “You’re my _friend_ ,” she had said, but the importance of that word, the immeasurable value of that bond, seemed lost on Neville. 

“Yeah, but I like you _more_ than a friend. _Better_ than a friend,” he had replied, turning away from her. They had continued to set up the room in painful, labored silence, as Luna furiously tried to think of a way to better communicate what was so obviously clear to her.

It wasn’t that she _couldn’t_ love people. In fact, she loved deeply, fully, and sometimes painfully. But as she had grown up, she began to realize that she loved differently from the other girls in her dormitory, who whispered of _crushes,_ who talked of wanting _boyfriends,_ who asked questions like, “Do you think she’ll like this?” when they got dressed for Hogsmeade dates, who stole kisses with their sweethearts in broom closets. Luna thought that she’d probably like to kiss someone, one day, but when her classmates talked about “being in love,” she felt somewhat mystified. When a third-year girl asked her why she didn’t have a boyfriend, Luna just shrugged: “It never really occurred to me to want one.”

Luna’s indifference to the machinations of relationships fueled rumors about her sexuality, and one day, a Ravenclaw prefect approached while she worked on a massive puzzle depicting the first International Warlock Convention in 1289. “Luna, could I talk to you for a second?” she asked.

“Oh, hello, Padma,” Luna had replied cheerily. “Do you want to help me with this puzzle? It’s not entirely historically accurate, of course - not a Damberplimp to be seen, and you know that they had almost entirely taken over this part of - “

“Maybe later, Luna,” Padma Patil hastily interrupted. “I actually wanted to talk to you about - well, there’s a bit of a rumor going around, and I wanted to see how you were doing.”

“Naturally,” Luna replied, carefully eyeing the puzzle, a single piece pinched between her fingertips. “I’m afraid you’ll have to be a bit more specific, unfortunately.”

Padma paused for a second, as if she were momentarily reconsidering her course of action. “Yes, well,” she barreled on. “I’m just going to come straight out and say it, because there’s absolutely nothing to be ashamed of, but Luna - Luna, do you think you might like girls?”

Luna looked up from her puzzle, a look of studious appraisal on her face. “They aren’t so bad,” she answered thoughtfully. “I generally consider myself to be one, and I like myself quite a bit. So on the whole, yes.”

“I don’t think that’s _quite_ what I meant, Luna,” Padma said, somewhat at a loss for words.

“Seems like it,” Luna said. Padma briefly attempted to decipher her response, and then continued on, still determined.

“See, _I_ like girls, the way that my sister, Parvati, likes boys. She has a crush on a boy right now, but I’ve been dating a girl since the Yule Ball. I’m a lesbian, and she’s heterosexual. Some of the other people in the house have been saying that you don’t like boys, and that maybe you were a lesbian, or bisexual, and I wanted to assure you that that’d be completely alright.”

“I’m sure it would be,” Luna answered easily, snapping a puzzle piece into place. “Oh, how lovely.” 

“You see, some of the other houses aren’t quite as enlightened as we are, but in Ravenclaw, no one will make fun of you, or bully you, if you think you might be a lesbian.”

“I imagine that’s very good, if you’re a lesbian,” Luna nodded. She pressed a piece into the puzzle.

Padma looked exhausted. “So, you’re saying that you’re _not_ a lesbian?”

“Not that I’m aware of,” Luna said.

“Are you straight, then?” Padma pressed, curiosity seemingly getting the better of her. “Or bisexual, maybe?”

Luna sighed, looking up from her puzzle once more. “I really haven’t given it much thought, although it’s clearly a perfectly good subject for some people.”

She returned to the task at hand in a decisive fashion, and Padma seemed to finally give up. “Well, as long as you’re…comfortable with that, I suppose. If you have any questions, or if anyone gives you a hard time, you can always come to me, though.”

“Thanks,” Luna said, slotting another piece into the puzzle. “Splendid!”

 

Luna knew that her disinterest in relationships and her indifference to labels marked her as different from her peers, but for the most part, this didn’t really trouble her. There had always been conversations that she simply wasn’t a part of, and the whole topic of romance and “falling in love” was just one more. 

But as she tried to explain all of this to Neville, after corning him outside of the Potions classroom one Tuesday evening, she found herself wishing that she could just _normal_. Neville had barely spoken to her for a fortnight, and as the world around them grew increasingly uncertain, she felt the loss of her friend even more acutely.

Neville listened to her patiently, as she tried to describe her experiences overhearing the girls in her dorm talk about their crushes, and how it always seemed simultaneously foreign and entirely disinteresting. She tried to explain that being friends was so very much better, to her, and that she loved Neville too much to pretend to be something she was not.

Finally, Neville interrupted her gently. “Luna, you don’t have to apologize - _I’m_ the one who should be sorry, I said all those things and then I just…froze. You don’t have to apologize for not being in love with me, I just hope I didn’t make you feel uncomfortable, because I really like being your friend.”

“Exactly,” Luna replied, and for a moment, it seemed like everything would be okay.

“But I don’t entirely understand what you’re saying, about not ever having a crush on someone, about never falling for anyone - do you mean that you’ve haven’t yet, or that you don’t think you ever will?”

“Both,” Luna answered quickly. When Neville’s face screwed up into a question mark, she elaborated. “It’s just…It’s as if there was a language that everyone else speaks, but you don’t speak it. And that’s okay, because you speak all these other languages, and you can talk to the people that you love just fine, so you don’t _need_ to learn that one language. But sometimes people try to talk to you in that language you can’t speak, and it’s hard to explain to them that you can’t reply, because you don’t speak it, so there’s all this confusion and miscommunication.”

Neville nodded slowly. “So…it’s like you just don’t know how to be in love with someone?”

“You could put it like that…But that makes it sound like something is missing from me, like I’m broken somehow, and I don’t feel that way.”

“Okay,” Neville said, confusion still written across his brow.

“Okay, see,” Luna said decisively. “There are different types of love, right? You don’t love your grandmother in the same way that you love me, right?”

Neville shuddered. “Completely different." 

“Exactly!” Luna grinned. This was working. “And you aren’t _in love_ with every person that you think is pretty, or handsome, right?”  

“I guess so,” Neville agreed.

“So there’s different ways to love, and there’s different kinds of being-attracted-to-people.”

“Well, yeah,” Neville nodded. “But I still don’t -“

“I just don’t do the romantic love stuff,” Luna said, certainty strengthening her voice. “I don’t want to date _anyone_ , and I don’t get crushes, and I don’t think I’ll ever fall in love with someone - and that’s perfectly fine, as far as you ask me. And I’m the only person that you should ask. Does that make more sense?”

Neville nodded, and he seemed to relax. “Yeah, it actually…it does, a bit. And I guess it doesn’t really matter if I don’t entirely get it, because it’s about you, not me.”

Luna smiled. 

“And,” he continued. “We can still be friends, right?”

“Forever,” she replied.

 

In the years that followed, Luna hadn’t really had to fully explain herself again. There hadn’t been much time for any kind of love during the last stretch of the war, and afterwards, when everyone else had begun to stitch themselves back together by knitting themselves into couples, Luna had left. There was a whole world to explore.

During her travels, she had her fair share of dalliances, in broom closets and beyond. She found that she quite liked kissing, and she liked sex, particularly when she was headed off to some new horizon the next morning. It made everything much simpler. And it was mostly men that she found attractive, in that physical, sensory sort of way, but she didn’t see much point in limiting herself to any one gender. For the most part, though, sex wasn’t particularly important to Luna, and it was never something she prioritized. There was so much else to do 

She had wondered, when she returned to London for the first time after that trip to Burnham Beeches, if she would one day have to tell Rolf about the different types of love. The more time they spent together, the more certain she was that he would one day offer something that she could neither accept nor return. The voice in the back of her head kept whispering that she should end it now, whatever _it_ was, because otherwise she would hurt him badly. And she couldn’t bear the thought of hurting him.

She liked Rolf in a way that she had never liked another person, and that was difficult to let go. It was entirely different from the way she felt about Neville, or Ginny, or Harry, Hermione, and Ron. She liked Rolf in the way that she liked herself: completely and intuitively. She felt entirely comfortable in his presence; she never felt stared _at_ when they walked the city together or spoken _about_ when he introduced her to his friends from school. He never laughed at her. He laughed at her jokes - and he could tell when she was joking, which no one other than her father had ever managed consistently - and he laughed with her, because he could somehow see the world through her eyes.

But she was not in love with him. It was hard to explain the difference, even to herself, but she knew it to be true, and she wouldn’t lie. She couldn’t lie, not to the one person who seemed to somehow accept her completely.

And so as she waited for Rolf to return from his nervous walk about the park, she tried to piece together how she would answer the implicit question of his letter.

No, she wasn’t in love with him.

But she couldn’t imagine life without him either.

 

When Rolf sat down cross-legged in front of her, nervously smoothing the ripples out of the blue-checked blanket, barely meeting her eye, she had briefly considered lying. She had made a habit of telling the truth - even the strange, unbelievable truths, even the truths that earned her confused grimaces and cruel whispers - but for just one short moment, she again wanted nothing more than to be normal. She wanted life to be easier, wanted Rolf to stay with her, wanted nothing to change. And she knew that if she smiled and said the words that she was supposed to say, if she loved the way she was supposed to love, that world would keep spinning and everything would stay the same.

As she watched Rolf’s near-black eyes shift uncertainly she felt an overwhelming urge to take his hands in her own and make promises she could not keep. It had been a long time since she had wanted to be anything other than herself, but in that moment, as she watched this man with a gentle laugh that crinkled into skin the color of an ocean at night, this man who _loved_ her so much he was trembling, she knew that she couldn’t lie. Not to him.

So she told the truth.

“I love you, too,” she said simply. “But I don’t fall _in_ love with people - I’m just different, I suppose, which probably isn’t much of a surprise. You’re my friend - the best friend I’ve ever had - and I don’t want that to change. And you're different from my other friends - I want more from you, but I don’t want a relationship, not the way most people think of it. And I’m terribly frightened that you won’t want anything to do with me after this, so frightened that part of me wanted to lie, but I couldn’t - not to you, and not about this.”

While she spoke, Rolf had stopped fidgeting, and he remained perfectly still as he listened. When she paused, he said calmly, “What do you want, then - if you don’t want a relationship?”

“A partnership,” Luna replied quickly. “A best friend. Someone I could - someone to do all the things that we do, really. Talk. Go on adventures. Write to each other when I’m away, and maybe - I don’t know, yet. But maybe someone to come home to, one day.” 

“And that’s not a relationship,” Rolf said, his brow furrowing slightly.

“Not the way - I mean, _I_ think it is. It’s the sort of relationship I would want. But I would never - I would never be _in love_ with you,” she said, and the bluntness of those words made her shiver. She watched Rolf carefully, but he seemed curiously unfazed.

“What does it even mean, though - to be ‘in love’?” he asked, and she wasn’t entirely sure if she was supposed to answer. But as the silence stretched on, she ventured small smile. 

“Well, I wouldn’t really be the person to ask, now would I?”

For a brief moment, she thought that his calm had cracked, and that disappointment and hurt would bubble over. But instead, he laughed softly. “No, you wouldn’t, I suppose. That’s really what you’re saying, isn’t it? You just don’t _do_ that kind of love.”  

She nodded quickly.

“But you love me,” he continued, and even though it was not a question, she nodded again. “You love me, and you don’t want anything to change.” 

“Would that - could that be something that you wanted, too?” she asked tentatively, and for the first time, a note of fear crept into her voice. 

“I have questions,” Rolf said thoughtfully. “But I think - I think it _is_ what I want. I love you because you’re - well, you’re not like anyone that I’ve ever known. And I don’t think that loving you would be like loving anyone else. I want to build a life with you, and I want to be a part of yours, but I never imagined that you would - that you would give up the things that make you who you are. If you say you love me, I trust you, and if the way I love you - as long as it doesn’t - as long as it’s what you want, too…I don’t see a problem.”

“Even if I could never be _in_ love with you? Even if we always loved each other differently?”

“I don’t really even know what the difference is, to tell you the truth. I’ve never questioned any of it - the whole idea of falling in love with someone, and picking them to be your person, that’s just what I assumed was the default setting. But there are billions and billions of people in this world, and it’s not surprising to me to think that they might not all want the same things out of life, or experience love in the same way. I think that, for me, what’s important is knowing that you pick me. You choose me, and a life with me - and we can take it from there. We could figure it out, together. It doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s life. I wouldn’t want it to, honestly.”

She hummed slightly, speechless and somewhat scared to interrupt Rolf, to give him the chance to change his mind or take back his words.

“I actually like the idea of this,” he gestured to the air between them. “Of it being a partnership - that’s what you said, right? A partnership?” 

“Yes, very much.” 

He seemed to be considering it, turning the word over and over in his mind, and there was a long pause before he spoke again. “Can I ask you a question? A sort of…personal question?”

“Sure,” she replied.

“We’ve never kissed, or anything of that particular…sort,” he said hesitantly. “Which isn’tat all a problem, and I would never want you to do anything you don’t like, just for me, but I’ve thought about it and it seems…relevant?”

Luna laughed. “I enjoy sex,” she said simply, and her reply startled a laugh out of him.

“Well, me too,” he said bemusedly. “But more specifically, what do you think about having sex with me?”

“I’ve thought about it,” she said more seriously. “And I’m certainly interested. I find you exceptionally attractive, in a sort of tactile fashion. I think that sex could be part of our partnership.”

“I’m not even going to pretend to follow this whole ‘tactile’ business,” he said, shaking his head with a smile.

“I could probably show you, at some point,” Luna said, which surprised another laugh out of Rolf. 

“You’re ridiculously charming, you know,” he said.

 

* * *

 

It is not easy to build something without directions, without a point of reference, without a map or guideposts. It is not easy to build a relationship that is not a relationship, a shared love that is not romantic, a partnership that is unlike any other and a life that has never been lived.

But, as Rolf is fond of saying, if it were easy, if it were "normal," it wouldn’t be for them.

Some days, he does worry that the shape of his heart does not fit alongside hers, that they are two puzzle pieces that do not quite go. He worries that his way of loving is too cloying, and he worries that his arms hold her too close. Some days, he worries that they are on a fool’s errand, and then he remembers that Cupid was the world’s greatest fool. 

He never worries that she doesn’t love him, in her own strange and wondrous way. She never worries that he wants something that she cannot give.

They are, first and foremost, partners.

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's a bit silly that this took me so long to finish this; after all, this last bit is only 1600 words and it's been an actual year. But here it is!
> 
> I had originally thought that I might revisit Luna's relationship with her father in greater detail, but as I revised this, it didn't quite seem to fit. I might one day return to these characters and take up that story - but I wanted to end this story with an eye toward Luna's future, not her past. Thank you to everyone who's read and commented - it's much appreciated.

“I have been looking forward to this day for quite some time. Come closer, boys, let me have a look at you.”

It was unusually cold for July. A fine grey mist followed the Lovegoods into the shop, which was empty save its smiling proprietor.

“Like looking in a mirror, save for the eyes,” Ollivander murmured. The boys shifted uncertainly before his gaze. Their eyes were always the first thing to draw the attention of passersby; in all other respects, Lorcan and Lysander were perfect twins. But while Lorcan’s bright black eyes mirrored his parents’, Lysander had the silver irises of a man he had never met. 

Luna’s long hair fishtailed down her back in a seashell-studded braid. A thin gold band wrapped its way around her ring finger; she and Rolf had gotten married a few years previous. (When they had told their sons that they planned to marry in the spring, the boys had responded characteristically. Without looking up from his children’s anthology of goblin history, Lorcan had muttered, “Why bother.” Lysander had jumped up excitedly, knocking over his paint set, beaming. They were delightfully strange nine year olds.)

Over a decade had passed since Rolf and Luna had sat on a blue-checkered blanket and tried to imagine their future. In some respects, it had unfolded exactly as they expected, and in others, it was an absolute surprise.

Luna had travelled well into her pregnancy, and as soon as the boys were born and weaned, she went out into the world again. During her months at home, she compiled her Quibbler columns and her travel journals into a manuscript which Rolf illustrated in delicate watercolor; the volume, called simply _Dispatches_ , was the first title from Lee Jordan’s new publishing house and proved to be a surprise bestseller. Combined with Rolf’s annual remittance from a trust established by his grandfather, the royalties from _Dispatches_ paid for a Muggle warehouse in Kentish Town, which they received permission from the Wizarding Housing Authority to magically refashion. From the street, it appeared to be some kind of kitchen appliance manufacturer. Inside, they recreated a tropical aviary in their living room and put a nineteenth-century wizarding printing press in the kitchen; the boys slept on hammocks seemingly suspended in mid-air, which could be made to race around the warehouse. Luna kept a study on the top floor with a magicked window, from which she could see the Croatian coastline. For his birthday, she repapered Rolf’s office with a magical map of London, which ran seamlessly over the floor, walls, and ceiling.

Hermione Granger had quickly ascended to the highest office in the Ministry. In one of her earliest and most controversial moves, she had entirely restructured the Muggle Liason Office, which had heretofore been primarily concerned with preserving the Statute of Secrecy, deploying Obliviators (derogatorily called “Muggleminders”) and tracking down loose creatures and curses. Under the Granger administration, the Muggle Liason Office doubled in size, cut their Obliviation rates in half, and took up a policy of “discreet and discrete inter-community development.” Rolf was recruited out of the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures (which was subsequently renamed the Department for Cooperative Relations Amongst Magical Beings) and assigned to the Muggle Liason Office as the London Magical Liason-At-Large. He occupied the newly created twenty-sixth seat on the London Assembly and could get to the Muggle city hall by way of a rusty filing cabinet in his office at the Ministry. 

He found the ambassadorial aspects of his new position to be particularly dull, and kept mixing up the Lord Mayor and Mayor of London in his reports, much to the chagrin of literally all involved. But under its auspices, he was able to finally begin mapping the historical and contemporary wizarding settlements in the city; the cartographic compendium would take over a decade to complete but would eventually offer the most comprehensive survey of magical London across the centuries, becoming a household fixture within a fortnight of its publication. In a partnership with the Magiko Zoologiko Institute, he also led a rehoming initiative for the city’s endangered magical creatures, and (to Hermione’s delight) coordinated a successful Squib rights campaign, calling for their unfettered and autonomous access to the wizard-only districts of London, including but not limited to Diagon Alley. The Daily Prophet - which had been roundly decried after the second wizarding war, and had largely been reduced to a tabloid rag - ran an expose on Rolf and Hermione Granger, alleging a sexual affair and a secret plot to overturn the Statute of Secrecy. Hermione kept a copy of the article hanging in her office; she liked to throw darts at it. Luna had found it immensely amusing as well, remarking that the Prophet had always been rubbish.

On a clear spring evening, Rolf and Luna got married in their living room with birds overhead. It was a small ceremony; the twins were witnesses. He took her name, and was glad to finally be rid of all that dead weight. 

In short, they were happy.

 

 

Just a few weeks before the boys were born, Rolf and Luna made the trip to Ottery St Catchpole. They walked up the moor slowly. There was no sight of the black rook house. It had been damaged irreparably during the war, and neither Xenophilius nor Luna had ever returned.

Xenophilius survived the war, but only just barely. Luna was surveying the Arabat Arrow for Dugbogs when he died; they had not spoken in some months’ time. It had been Hermione who told Luna of her father’s betrayal, although she had expected it for some time.“We didn’t want to hurt you anymore than you’d already been,” Hermione had said apologetically. Luna had almost laughed at this - at the notion that pain was something to be controlled, to be doled out in manageable parcels, and not in fact some wild, immeasurable thing.

Luna had never believed in all of her father’s stories. She had known, of course, that some were just that - just stories. Still, she had chosen to believe.

But the confirmation of her father’s betrayal - even though it had been in her name,or perhaps because it had been in her name - robbed her of that choice for some time. She came home for the funeral, and left quickly after. A year later, Rolf’s letter reached her.

She had already told Rolf about her father - his role in the war, and his sudden death from a common Muggle ailment, curable by a magic he would no longer perform. But on that day in the countryside, a month before she was to become a mother herself, she told Rolf of her anger, which had unspooled from its heavy coil in the years after the war. 

Long reedy grass had grown up over the ruins. “This was the door,” Luna said quietly. “And my room, it looked out over there - I woke up to those hills every morning.”

“It must have been lovely.”

“It was lonely,” Luna said.

They made a careful circle around what had been the foundation of the house. “When my mother died, my father - he was very afraid. For a long time I didn’t understand that it was fear, and then when I did, I was so angry. And it was fear that drove him to - to help the Death Eaters in the war, just like it was fear that kept us locked up here.”

Rolf took her hand gently, and she continued. “Professor Flitwick had to come here himself. My father didn’t want me to go to Hogwarts - he didn’t want me to learn magic. Magic was alright for him, but for me, it was too dangerous.”

“But he changed his mind?”

“It got changed for him.”

They fell silent. Wind rushed through the grass.

“I wish I hadn’t - I didn’t know, of course. That he would die. He wasn’t a cruel man. He loved me very much. But that was the problem, I suppose.”

“What would you say to him now, if you could?”

“That the world wasn’t nearly as dangerous as he made it out to be. And that it was far more lovely.”

 

 

Eleven years later, Luna and Rolf stood in the dusty dark of the wand shop with their boys. On Ollivander’s direction, Rolf climbed up a rickety ladder and pulled down boxes as each twin tried out wander after wand. 

“The wand chooses the wizard, my boys,” Ollivander said wheezily. He pointed over to a low shelf containing two battered black boxes. “Why don’t you try these two. There you go.”

Lysander grabbed his first. The twins shared a quick glance before drawing the wands from their tissued confines, and in one fluid motion, they raised the wands over their heads.

Both wands emitted a great shower of silver sparks. A sinewy catamount blossomed from the tip of Lorcan’s wand; Lysander’s eyes widened in shock to see a glittering horse gambol out of his. Ollivander smiled mistily.

“Many years ago, I collected precisely two hairs from the tail of a particularly spirited unicorn. One I bound in acacia, and one in hawthorn. It seemed fitting then…although I could not have known, but of course, the wand always does…to carve them as twins. The same length, the same width. And there they have sat for years, waiting for twins of their own.”

The boys shuffled awkwardly under Ollivander’s gaze. The silvery animals, same color as the fog outside, faded into the air.

“Say thank you, boys,” Rolf said.

“Thank you,” they chorused.

“It was my pleasure,” Ollivander replied.

Luna smiled. 

**Author's Note:**

>  **Content warning:** As in canon, Pandora Lovegood dies from a spell gone wrong. The death is described here, but not particularly explicitly.


End file.
